Whether e-learning or traditional learning is better for your business depends on a number of factors. Your business style, the resources available to you and the needs of your employees all have a role to play. Some businesses are able to fully embrace e-learning. Others prefer to use a blend of traditional learning and e-learning to benefit from the strengths of both.
What is traditional learning and e-learning?
Traditional learning, also known as in-person learning, usually takes place in a physical classroom setting. The teacher is the main source of information and the curriculum follows a standardized format. The learners rely on physical textbooks. Assessment relies on tests and written assignments.
Electronic learning is the delivery of educational content via electronic media and over the internet. It can happen in a variety of different settings. It is gaining ground in the corporate sector where businesses use it for corporate training, skills development, and continuing professional development.
Pros and cons of traditional learning
Pros of traditional learning
- In-person learning can be beneficial. Some learners learn better when teachers take an active role in guiding the learning process.
- The curriculum is carefully constructed and learners follow a set schedule. This gives them a sense of order and routine.
- The teacher has an authoritative role and maintains discipline to allow learners to focus.
- Textbooks provide tangible resources for learners to reference.
- Traditional teaching methods have a proven track record of imparting knowledge and skills over many years. They offer a familiarity that’s reassuring.
Cons of traditional learning
- Learners tend to learn passively rather than actively. This can hinder their understanding and retention of material.
- Teachers often fail to connect learning to real-world applications. Learners find it difficult to see its relevance.
- The one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t cater to different learning styles. The teacher sets the pace and learners must follow.
- An emphasis on memorizing facts doesn’t promote critical thinking and deep understanding.
- A lack of variety can lead to boredom. If learners aren’t interested, they lack motivation.
- An overemphasis on grades and standardized testing can create unhealthy competition and stress.
When transitioning to online training vs classroom training you can still use some of the strengths of traditional methods while incorporating innovative e-learning.
Benefits of e-learning in a digital age
E-learning has many benefits for your business and your employees.
1. Save costs
One of the benefits of e-learning vs. traditional learning is that it helps to lower training costs. You don’t have to rent a venue, rent accommodation or cover travel costs. You simply develop online training courses and share them with your employees who can access them on their mobile devices.
1. Use interactive elements to create engagement
Businesses can use various interactive elements in videos. These include quizzes, polls, game-like elements, etc. This helps to create more engagement and knowledge retention. The Cincopa platform offers interactive video features such as annotations, calls-to-action, polls, and quizzes to increase employee engagement.
2. Remove barriers to learning
Your employees don’t have to waste time attending physical classes. They can access course material at any time and from any location. This may be during a lunch break, while commuting, or over weekends. Those who want to watch a video without sound, have a hearing disability, or speak a foreign language can use subtitles and transcriptions to understand video content. Video messaging tools enable employees to quickly communicate and help one another to learn.
3. Allow for onboarding and training of new hires
Access to a library of on-demand videos can help new hires study at their own pace and learn everything from compliance training to best security practices.
4. Provide video courses and presentations for clients
You can use videos and presentations to explain to clients how to use products or services and their benefits.
5. Track employee progress
Access to reports and analytics offer insights into the progress of employees. This means you can offer them supplementary videos if they are struggling or extra resources if they are progressing quickly.
Cincopa video hosting platform helps to make e-learning flexible, customizable, scalable, and interactive. It has advanced analytics that include dashboards and heat maps. They offer insights into learner behavior, such as how they engage with videos. You can see when they watch a whole video, drop off, skip, or rewatch. This gives you the insights you need to keep improving your training videos.
Key factors to consider when transitioning to e-learning
Perhaps you need to transition to e-learning because most of your employees work remotely. You may simply want to streamline your training materials. Whatever your reason, you will need a short-term plan.
Have a short-term plan
You may want to begin with virtual instructor-led training while you put together a long-term online training plan. This can give employees a chance to get used to a new platform with some support from a trainer.
Analyze your training needs
Analyze how many employees need training and which topics you need to cover first. Think about what is outdated in your current training. This will help you to set your training goals. For example, if your main purpose is to develop the skills of your sales professionals, you will need courses that teach soft skills and product training courses.
Lay out development phases and get buy-in
Lay out every phase of developing e-learning and match it with your training goals and budget. Make sure everyone is on board and ready to allocate resources for converting in-person training to virtual training.
Consider re-using current resources
See if there are resources you can reuse. You may be able to use hard copies of manuals as a foundation for developing e-learning resources.
Decide on types of training
Consider what types of training suit your material best. You may want to use screencasts, and talking head videos for tutorials. Quizzes can help you to assess learner progress. Live streaming of webinars offers opportunities for interactions with viewers. Podcasts, simulations, and ebooks provide other useful ways to learn. Each type of training has its own strengths and is suited to different learning goals.
Find a platform that suits your needs
You need an e-learning platform that offers rich, data-driven e-learning experiences for learners. Go to the home Page of the Cincopa multimedia platform and you can find out more about the efficient solutions it offers for e-learning.
- The RecTrace tool allows you to create high-quality personalized videos using the screen, webcam, or both at the same time.
- Use multimedia such as videos, infographics, podcasts, etc. to offer more variety.
- It is easy to organize training videos by using galleries and SEO-automated embed codes to embed them on your website.
- Using the platform will help to prevent technical issues and ensure that your employees don’t have to endure buffering or freezing. Its responsive design means they can watch videos on mobile devices and enjoy quality and speed. Cincopa has a content delivery network (CDN) with distributed servers so they can get video content from a server nearest to them.
- The platform’s advanced security features such as encryption, single-sign-on (SSO) and domain lock can help to protect confidential information.
- As previously mentioned, Cincopa’s advanced video analytics will give you in-depth insights into how your employees interact with your video training content. This enables you to make data-driven decisions on how to improve it.
Conclusion
Online learning is revolutionizing the way your employees learn and offering an alternative to traditional classroom education. It can offer greater flexibility, access to a broader range of resources, and many other benefits. Cincopa video hosting platform will help you to create, upload, manage, store, and distribute e-learning content.
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